Important People of World War Z
Listed here are a number of notable individuals from the novel World War Z U.S.A. Vice President "The Whacko": The former vice-president then later President of the United States during the zombie war. Before the outbreak, he was a rising star on the political stage, until he "self-destructed", hence why the media nicknamed him "the Whacko" (an allusion to the Howard Dean yell). A man who isn't afraid to voice his opinion (loudly), after the U.S. relocation behind the Rockies, he was appointed vice president to the newly-appointed "Big Guy" in a bi-partisan administration. His party wanted someone else, but didn't want both a black president and vice president. The Whacko and the Big Guy made a good team, the Whacko was passionate, the Big Guy was logical and calm. The Whacko was usually objecting to some of the more unorthodox solutions to the various problems the country was facing, such as the new Punishment Laws, until the Big Guy made him see the logic behind it. The Whacko eventually became President himself during the U.S. Reclamation or "Road to New York", after the sudden stress-related death of his boss. After V.A. day, the Whacko had wanted to send the U.S. Army to help clear other infested areas, but relented, believing that the Troops had done enough. He did however support the U.N. force that was formed to clear the rest of the world. By the time of Max Brooks's interview, The Whacko lives in semi-retirement at his home in Vermont. He claims that he had the greatest respect for his old boss, and that he could never be replaced. President "The Big Guy": African-American Vice President during the administration that led to the Great Panic, "the Big Guy" (his name is never stated, though he is strongly implied to be Colin Powell) found himself sworn in as President during the retreat behind the Rocky Mountains, when his predecessor fell into catatonic shock after the Battle of Yonkers. He formed a bi-partisan administration with "The Whacko" as vice president. His first act in office was to take the effort to continue with the elections despite the instability of the government. The Whacko pleaded that he put aside the high ideals and push Congress to grant him extended emergency powers, but the President insisted that those very ideals were what made this country and without them, it would no longer be a future for America. They won in a landslide and throughout the war he would stand as a symbol of hope not just to America, but to desperate people around the globe. A practical leader, the Big Guy enacted policies that seemed radical and un-American, but had a core of pure logic. The single greatest living threat to the country, armed rebels and secessionists, were his greatest burdens, and though he never let on, they took their toll on him. After the United States economy stabilized, the President announced to the world that the U.S. would go permanently on the offensive until it had reclaimed all its territory. When the Army pushed east and began to encounter hostile rebels, whereas The President had the rebels in the safe zone eliminated swiftly, since the ones in infested areas had been literally abandoned, he allowed every rebel group to peacefully reintegrate. The ones who didn't however, had to be stopped, and these burdens weighed the most heavily on the Big Guy. All throughout the War, he was so devoted on insuring that America would have a future that he never even tried to find out what became of his relatives in Jamaica. The stress eventually killed him, and he died in office, to be replaced by the Whacko. Arthur Sinclair Jr: former Director of the Department of Strategic Resources, or "DeStRes"; currently head of the "Money Police"; Arthur Sinclair Sr. was part of F.D.R.'s New Deal programs. General Travis D'Ambrosia: Appointed Chairman of the Joint Chief of staff during World War Z, and invented the Resource-to-Kill-Ratio, or R.K.R., which soon defined the barter system in the U.S. Economy. Was the commanding general during the Road to New York. Todd Wainio: U.S. Infantryman; veteran of Battle of Yonkers, Battle of Hope, and veteran of U.S. reclamation known as the Road to New York Captain Gavin Blair: Former Fujifilm blimp pilot; current captain of a D-17 dirigible in the Civil Air Patrol Max Brooks: U.N. interviewer; author of World War Z Breckenridge "Breck" Scott: The developer of the placebo Phalanx, he feels no guilt about lying to the American people. He now lives in Vostok station in the Artic and hasn't left it since the great panic. Roy Elliot: Filmmaker who made independent propaganda films during the war to combat Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome; Film to credit: Battle of the Five Colleges: students fight off zombie siege on campus; Anacapal; Mission District; Dos Palmos; Fire of the Gods: hi-tech laser weapons used to fry zombies; the "Wonder Weapons" series: seven films showing technological duds used on zombies to entertaining effect; The Hero City: the reclamation of New York City. Canada Stanly MacDonald: Former Solider of the 3rd Battalion of Princess Patrica's Canadian Light Infantry shortly after the outbreaks in China. His squad led a mission to cut off the drug supply that funded a terrorist organization in Kyrgyzstan. Their first clue to the cave hideout was several slaughtered donkeys on a trail (that appeared to have been eaten), abandoned supplies and drugs (very unusual), and a trail of blood and footprints. Following those, they found where the owner had fallen, then got back up again and wandered off, and from there the pattern of the footprints changed from running to a dragging shuffle. Finding the cave, the squad found blood and bullet holes everywhere, and venturing further in, found body parts blown apart by the terrorist's own booby traps. In every cavern, they saw evidence of what appeared to literally be a one-sided firefight: bullet holes all on one side of the cavern, and bloodstains and gnawed bones on the other. The only relatively intact corpses appeared to have died from head shots. MacDonald was attacked by, and subsequently dispatched, a zombie caught in a cave-in. Since no-one else saw it, MacDonald was later "helped" (interrogated) by his superiors who had disbelieved his story and dismissed it with "plausible" explanations. Africa Paul Redeker/Xolelwa Azania: designer of the Redeker Plan; Status: insane China Dr. Kwang Jingshu: Identified Patient 0 in the small village of New Dachang, China. Though not actually the first in China to discover the outbreak, his is the earliest surviving testimony. Captain Chen: Captain of a Chinese nuclear ICBM submarine who went rogue during China's failed attempt to defend itself; personally fired the ICBM that destroyed the communist regime of China; status: deceased Japan Tomonaga Ijiro: Founder of the Tatenokai; blind "hibakusha" and former gardener. A survivor of the Hiroshima bombing in WWII, an event which left him permanently blind, Tomonaga became a "Hibakusha" literally "explosion-affected person". Hibakusha and their children were (and still are) victims of severe discrimination due to lack of knowledge about the consequences of radiation sickness, which people believed to be hereditary or even contagious, as well as living symbols of their nation's defeat. Being among these people was shameful enough, but being blind made him a burden to others too. He tried to kill himself many times, but his inability to go through with it made him perceive himself as a coward as well. Running away from his home in shame, Tomonaga eventually became friends with an Ainu gardener, who personally gave him a job at the Akakaze hotel in Hokaido. Tomonaga continued with this job for year after his friend's death until the day he started hearing about mysterious murders. The rumors persisted as the crisis grew larger, and after hearing his manager's attempts to ease the situation, Tomonaga decided to leave for the wilderness, not to protect himself, but to keep from being a shameful burden to others. However during an incident when a bear (which he thought was meant to kill him) alerted him to an approaching zombie, Tomonaga decided to live until he discovered why the Kami (nature gods said to inhabit everything) had spared him. For months he managed to survive against the increasing number of zombies he began to encounter armed only with his gardening shovel, using both his remaining heightened senses to detect the ghouls with plenty of time, and his knowledge of the advantageous terrain to ensure his victory against the ghouls. During this time, he once again became a Shinto-Buddhist, always burying his kills and praying to the Kami for their assistance. When he ran into Kondo Tatsumi (a computer nerd who had managed to fight his way into the wilderness armed with a WWII-era katana), Tatsumi updated Tomonaga on Japan's evacuation. Tomonaga was struck with a divine inspiration, where the two, along with whatever survivors they could find, would "cleanse the garden of Japan” of the undead “pests”, a daunting task indeed, although Tomonaga felt confident that the “gods” were on their side. After the war, Tomonaga's Tatenokai (Shield Society; not the same Tatenokai that had tried to stage a coup in the 1970s) had proven so effective that it became an official branch of the Japanese Defense Force, and proudly maintains a non-firearms policy. Kondo Tatsumi: Second-in-command and co-founder of the Tatenokai. Tatsumi was an otaku in his high-school years, who had spent the early months of the Great Panic online, feverishly gathering information as his way of escaping reality. Reality rudly intruded one morning, as Tatsumi awoke to find that his parents were missing, the power was out, and he couldn't connect to the internet. His subsequent mental breakdown was heard by several ghouls who then tried to get into his apartment. Tatsumi survived by creating a rope out of sheets and moving from one floor to another from the outside balconies, gathering whatever supplies he could from each apartment. The ordeal made him realize just how weak he was and how much he had wasted his life. He eventually made his way into the apartment of an elderly (and now reanimated) neighbor, and Tatsumi found a WWII officer's katana in an old foot locker, with which he managed to escape the city alive. He made his way into the forest where he had ran into Tomonaga. After being ambushed and forced to relate what had happened in Japan, Tomonaga revealed his divine inspiration to Tatsumi. Although he thought Tomonaga was crazy for attempting such odds, he still decided to join the blind man, not having a much better option. By the time of Max Brooks' novel, Tatsumi is a athletically-built and expeirenced warrior monk, unrecognisiable from his teenaged self. Although he is still very skeptical of Tomonaga's shintoist beliefs, he has great respect for the man. India General Raj-Singh: "the Tiger of Delhi", the general who commanded the forces fighting the undead in the battle in Ghandi Park, where he devised an ingenious tactic: tight rank-and-file infantry formation around the vehicles in the center of the park (the kind of tactic the British used in Colonial India), turning into a square formation as they got surrounded. This tactic successfully held off the zombies until the under-supplied troops ran out of ammo and where overrun. Raj-Singh refused to abandon his men, but one of them punched him out and forced him onto an evacuation chopper. Other countries would adopt the "Raj-Singh Maneuver" into their wartime strategies. Later, during India's retreat into the mountains, Raj-Singh personally charged into a flood of refugees and ghouls to manually detonate the charges that sealed off the pass when the charges failed to detonate remotely. The General made this decision in face of the alternative: "Shiva's Wrath", or the launch of a nuclear missile which in addition to the obvious hazards, would have turned the narrow path into a gently sloping ramp for the undead; Status: deceased Israel Jurgen Warbrunn: Member of the Israeli Intelligence Agency and co-author of the Warbrunn-Knight Report. A survivor of the Holocaust, Warbrunn eventually settled in Israel and later became part of the intelligence service. During the early outbreaks in what was to become World War Z, Warbrunn was contacted by customers in Taiwan who were having trouble deciphering encrypted messages from some PRC sources with their Israeli-bought software. He had his theories, but Warbrunn decided to look at the e-mails themselves. He found that they were perfectly decrypted and translated, but the messages themselves were about some new virus that turned those it killed into homicidal berserkers. Warbrunn suspected that this had to be some code within a code, though the Taiwan Strait Crisis a few weeks later ended the messages about rampaging corpses. He let the matter drop, though he was still suspicious. He later heard a story from his son-in-law's professor about his cousin in Cape Town, South Africa about hostile golems made from reanimated bodies in a hospital. Warbrunn presented his finding, along with the Chinese e-mails to his superiors. Since the Yom Kippur war in 1973, Israeli Intelligence had started taking every possible threat seriously, no matter how outrageous or far-fetched it sounded. Warbrunn was told to investigate the matter further, and though he had to sift through much misinformation, he began to see "rabies" patterns emerging. He looked into cases from a Canadian Special Forces team who had found a terrorist hideout the scene of a bizarre massacre, and the account of a traumatized nurse in Brazil about the murder of a heart surgeon. Sifting through unread U.N. reports that had "plausible" explanations, Warbrunn began to see how vast the this threat really was, and its actual facts. Warbrunn consulted an old colleague, Paul Knight, only to find that Knight had compiled a similar report. The two presented their findings to the Israeli Government, and had a number of experts do research into the matter. Israel presented the Warbrunn-Knight Report to the U.N., though many countries disbelieved its findings as too incredible. Israel's Muslim neighbors thought that it was an outright Zionist lie designed to cover up military defeats in Gaza. Israel soon after enacted its self-quarantine plan. Russia Father Sergei Ryzhkov: Former chaplain in the Russian army; founder of the religious dogma that now defines the Holy Russian Empire; exiled to Siberia for protesting the new government's policies. Category:World War Z